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Friday, 13 November 2015

JAY STRINGER - FAITHLESS STREET (2012)

Synopsis/blurb…..

Faithless Street is a
collection of four short stories that set the scene for the novel Old Gold.
Each story is set in the Black Country, in the English Midlands, and shows
glimpses of people’s lives as they try to make ends meet amidst gang life,
drugs deals and Gypsy camp evictions.

There’s a piece from author Jay Stringer on his Amazon page that puts some context to his
writing and his character Eoin Miller…..

Some people hate their home town,
some love it. One way or another we’re all formed by it, and wherever I go, I’m
taking the English Midlands with me. It’s like letting the world in on a
secret.

It has a population the same size
as Scotland, but it doesn’t have a devolved government of its own. It has a
strong identity, but also gets buried amidst the media’s attempts to make
everywhere into London.

In the Midlands factories got
closed. Mines got filled. Generations lost their jobs and their futures. What
happens when industry collapses in an industrial region?

Many say there isn’t a gun culture
in Britain. If you’ve lived in this area with your eyes open, you’ve seen
things that the national press just doesn’t want to cover. There’s been an
ongoing gang war in Birmingham for over 20 years. A real war with a real body
count. And it's getting worse; where once it was a few gangs fighting to
control the drug trade and nightclubs, now it's any number of young men with guns,
fighting over streets and post codes.

But you wouldn’t know any of this
by picking up any of the nation’s newspapers. There’s nothing in anyone’s
interest to report on people dying in the midlands. They’re the wrong class,
the wrong colour and have the wrong accent.

The IRA had a strong presence in
the area during ‘the troubles,’ but what happened after that? More than once
I’ve been in an Irish pub when the man came collecting for ‘the cause.’ The
whole world knows the story of how freedom fighters became terrorists, but does
anyone want to hear the next chapter?

How about the Asian gangs who grew
up in the eighties to defend their communities? Twenty years later they were
sitting on top of drug empires and causing trouble for a fresh wave of
immigrants. How did that happen? More stories; the pub bombings of the
seventies, the race riots of the 80′s, the persecution of the Roma.

I want to write about a place that
matters to me and to hopefully make you laugh, make you reel and make you
think- after I’ve entertained you. Faithless Street and Old Gold are my
attempts at a first person detective story of sorts. Pulp fiction, first and
foremost, but they will sneak in some social fiction if you look the other way.
It tells of a half-gypsy gangland detective. If you’re a businessman looking to
find a statue of a falcon or a family looking for a missing toddler, you need
not apply to Eoin Miller. If you’re a drug lord looking for a missing stash, or
an illegal immigrant looking to stop a rapist, then he might be the man for
you. He is very happy ignoring the world, his friends and his family. He’s
doing a very nice job of learning to bury his conscience. He will take your
money and find something you’ve lost, and then he will walk away.

Who wouldn’t want to try his stuff after reading that?

Faithless Street -
4 short stories, was read in conjunction with the full length novel Old Gold. Stringer in his intro to the
stories suggests reading them at various points during Old Gold, as opposed to
zipping through them one after the other. Curbing my natural instincts to get
stuck in, I adopted his patient approach.

We encounter some interesting characters in our 4 tales.

Our main man and the central protagonist in Old Gold - Eoin
Miller is a gypsy cop. As such he’s an outsider now in his community, he’s disconnected
from his family and an outsider in his job – generally loathed and mistrusted
and the target of abuse. He’s dating/married to another cop – 2 different
stories and 2 different time frames - but they seem to speak a different
language to each other. Miller’s smart and observant.

In our other couple of tales, we encounter a couple of
low-level drug dealers; one pushing product recklessly because he’s in hock for
£7k. The other, Bauser has ambition to move up the ranks into middle management
– he’s got to prove himself though. Is wasting his pa a step too far?

Great setting, great dialogue, some of our payoffs are
under-stated but pretty much perfect. An author, I want to read more from……oh, I
already have.

10 comments:

Col, the author's piece on the Midlands region and what it means to him was very interesting. I have heard about the mafia wars in Birmingham and the involvement of Asians. Must be a scary place to live in.

This one certainly shows an eye-opening picture of life in the Midlands, Col! And with that kind of thinking behind it, I'm not surprised you enjoyed the collection as much as you did. And I think he's right: we're all shaped by where we come from, no matter how we may feel about it.

You're right - I left Ireland as a small child nearly 50 years ago, but I'm still Irish inside my heart and to a lesser degree my head. I don't think you can escape totally where you've come from - and neither do you always want to!

Synopsis/blurb…… Rennie Beckman is a dishonored ex-cop with only two things on his mind: his new boat, the Triggerfish, and his hot...

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